Showing 11 - 20 of 419 news articles
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New Campaign Targets OAuth 2.0 Protocol for Website User Authentication
New Patent Litigation
TransactionSecure, L.L.C. has launched a second litigation campaign over a decade after its first one ended. The Utah plaintiff accuses DeviantArt (2:19-cv-05836), Fitbit (3:19-cv-04075), and Stripe (3:19-cv-04052) of infringing a single patent generally related to authenticating a user’s identity using a “trusted entity” with a repository that holds the user’s personal information. (TransactionSecure also filed a case, since removed from PACER, over the same patent against Microsoft (GitHub) (3:19-cv-04050).) At issue in each case is the defendant’s use of the OAuth 2.0 protocol, a user authentication framework, on its website.
July 15, 2019
Fortress Seeks to Preserve Path to Resurrection for Twice-Invalidated Former Uniloc Patent
Patent Litigation Feature
Last month, RPX surveyed the effective use of inter partes review (IPR) by defendants in the many campaigns launched over patents once held by Uniloc Corporation Pty. Limited. The Australian NPE—and Fortress Investment Group LLC after its takeover of those campaigns in May 2018—has hit multiple invalidity walls in district court as well. For example, this past April was not a good month for a wireless communications patent, issuing to Philips, that Uniloc began asserting in early 2018. On April 5, Magistrate Judge Roy S. Payne of Texas invalidated claims 1 and 8 from that patent as indefinite, and four days later, District Judge Lucy H. Koh in California took the whole patent down as patent-ineligibly drawn to an abstract idea under Alice. However, recent decisions, in Fortress-Uniloc suits and elsewhere, may have provided the plaintiff additional motivation to clear a path, however rocky, for that embattled patent to survive in the end.
July 14, 2019
Inventor-Controlled Plaintiff Hits Samsung Mobile Payment Systems over “Magnetic Emulation Technologies”
New Patent Litigation
Dynamics Inc., billing itself as “an innovator in next-generation payment systems”, has filed suit against Samsung (1:19-cv-06479), accusing the company of infringing four patents generally relating to data transmission via “multifunction magnetic emulators”, “dynamic magnetic stripe communications devices”, and/or “magnetic stripe emulators”. The plaintiff reads the patents’ claims against certain Samsung Galaxy S8, S9, S10, Note8, and Note9 smartphones, as well as its Gear S3 Frontier smartwatch, targeting hardware components (e.g., MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) antenna, NFC (near field communication) antenna, wireless charging coil, etc.) of the devices that enable mobile proximity payments. Dynamics further pleads a breach of contract claim, alleging that Samsung divulged information provided by the plaintiff under NDA to LoopPay, a company that Samsung reportedly purchased for roughly $250M in 2015.
July 12, 2019
Spangenberg Entities Sued by Fortress Again, This Time in Texas State Court
Patent Market, Patent Watch
The fray between Fortress Investment Group LLC and Erich Spangenberg, over the transfer of a single patent currently active in litigation against Amazon, has now migrated from New York to Texas. The patent-at-issue is one among many assigned by Marathon Patent Group, Inc. to Fortress in 2017 after the NPE failed to repay Fortress $15.99M in debt financing. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) developed the patent, and it was the subject of litigation against Apple that ended in a reported $24.9M settlement in 2016.
July 12, 2019
New Mobile Check Deposit Campaign Hits Bank of America
New Patent Litigation
In a new Eastern District of Texas case, Bank of America (2:19-cv-00250) has been accused of infringing two patents generally related to using “ubiquitous imaging devices” to capture and transmit check images to a bank. The plaintiff is Lighthouse Consulting Group LLC, which targets Bank of America over the provision of a remote deposit feature within its “Mobile Checking Application”, perhaps a reference to the defendant’s mobile banking app. Lighthouse Consulting Group alleges that the defendant has been aware of the patents-in-suit since it entered into a non-disclosure agreement with the plaintiff in 2007.
July 12, 2019
After Berkheimer and Aatrix Block Another Early Alice Challenge, NPE Expands Conferencing Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Visible Connections, LLC has filed a second case in the campaign that it began last October. The new defendant is Zoom Video Communications (1:19-cv-03148), which is targeted with the same two patents—one generally related to teleconferencing via a data connection; the other, to real-time application sharing—over the provision of its Zoom Meetings, which features audio and video conferencing. This second case in the campaign follows a decision by District Judge Robert Pitman in the Western District of Texas that cites Berkheimer and Aatrix in rejecting a Rule 12 motion challenging the same two patents under Alice.
July 12, 2019
Gaming Campaign Expands Ahead of Joint Claim Construction Hearing in Texas
New Patent Litigation
Sony (2:19-cv-00248) has been added as a defendant in a gaming campaign headed toward a mid-August joint claim construction hearing in Texas. Terminal Reality Inc. and Infernal Technology, LLC, as patent owner and exclusive licensee, respectively, accuse Sony of infringing two patents—generally related to lighting and shadowing in computer graphics—through the provision of game engines “that are capable of performing deferred rendering, deferred shading, deferred lighting, physically based shading, and/or physically based rendering”, as well as through the provision of video games allegedly developed using those engines, including Everquest Next, Gran Turismo Sport, Horizon: Zero Dawn, the inFAMOUS series, and Knack.
July 11, 2019
Inventor-Controlled Entity Launches Image Correction Campaign
New Patent Litigation
Inventor-controlled Optimum Imaging Technologies LLC has filed suit against Canon (2:19-cv-00246) over the provision of certain cameras and camcorders, including EOS series cameras, PowerShot series cameras, the VIXIA HF G50 camcorder, and the XA20 camcorder. At issue is the “lens aberration correction” feature included in the software of the devices, with two patents—generally related to in-camera systems for filtering and correcting distortions—asserted.
July 10, 2019
Touchscreen Campaign Expands with Ten New Patents Asserted in District Court, as the ITC Institutes an Investigation Against the Same Defendants over the Prior Four
New Patent Litigation
Neodrón Limited has expanded the campaign that it began both in the Western District of Texas and before the International Trade Commission (ITC) in May. The NPE has filed a second set of Western District of Texas suits against prior defendants/respondents Amazon (6:19-cv-00395), Dell (6:19-cv-00396), Lenovo (Motorola Mobility) (6:19-cv-00398), Microsoft (6:19-cv-00399), and Samsung (6:19-cv-00400), while adding HP (6:19-cv-00397) as a defendant for the first time. (Neodron has also filed an amended complaint in a May case against HP Enterprise, naming HP as the defendant in that action instead.) The new raft of complaints adds ten more patents to the four already asserted in the campaign, all of them acquired from Microchip in December 2018. At issue are various computing devices of the defendants that have touchpads or touchscreens.
July 7, 2019
Federal Circuit Affirms Most of Cisco Reexam Win Against VirnetX
Patent Litigation Feature, Patent Market
The Federal Circuit has largely upheld an invalidity ruling for Cisco against a patent asserted by VirnetX, Inc. throughout its long-running litigation campaign. On June 28, the court reversed the invalidation of three claims cancelled in a Cisco inter partes reexamination, ruling that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had erred by not considering certain arguments and by not making certain factual findings. It therefore remanded the case for further consideration of those claims (2018-1751), after affirming the PTAB’s invalidation of 33 other claims from the same patent, finding no reversible error in that portion of the Board’s analysis. The affected patent has been asserted in multiple VirnetX cases that have gone to trial, including one that led to a 2013 noninfringement verdict as to Cisco and several verdicts involving Apple, some of which have been overturned amidst an ongoing appellate battle between Apple and the NPE.
July 7, 2019